By James Kunstler - May 28, 2021

Questions du jour: Can the US government make itself even more untrustworthy? Has it become an enemy of the people? Just wondering. What would be worse, actually, is if we learn that American culture is untrustworthy, since politics is downstream of culture. It would be the equivalent writ large of a human personality at war with itself, unable to trust its own thoughts and actions.

Which perhaps explains the seeming psychosis raging through our society at the moment. The hallucinatory delusions of the day are exactly what you’d expect in the kind of personality undergoing a psychotic stress fracture, like the character Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s classic horror movie, Psycho. Poor Norman (or “Mister Bates,” as Hitch playfully had the other characters call him), developed the unfortunate habit of dressing up like deceased Mother and slashing to death any other female for whom Mister Bates had impure thoughts. That was the 1960s version of the Transsexual Story Hour. We’ve come a long way, baby, since those innocent days.

In today’s day, another part of the collective personality is suddenly coming apart: science, or The Science, as the lingo has it these days. The Science is the system of hypotheses and proofs that normally plays the hero’s role in the task of determining reality, especially about things that are dangerous to mankind. The Science is supposedly behind what we know about the Covid-19 pandemic that has turned America, and much of the whole world, upside down. The Science has become so untrustworthy that an awful lot of people harbor suspicions that it has been running a number on them for the past year.

In the early going of the War on Covid-19, The Science told its soldiers, the doctors, to jam ventilators down patients’ throats. Whoops, that didn’t work so well. The Science told everybody to fuggeddabowt Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, Zinc, and Vitamin D. The Science told New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to stash Covid-19 infected patients in nursing homes. The Science told everybody don’t bother with masks, then to definitely wear masks, then to maybe not wear masks, then to wear double masks, then to get vaccinated and wear masks. Golly, what to believe? Some people began to think that The Science was full of shit — which is, let’s face it, a dangerous thought, and something which, thank Gawd, Facebook, Twitter, and Google corrected for us.

One thing The Science remained adamant about for a whole year was that Covid-19 did not come from the Wuhan, China, Institute of Virology, where-and-to-which, it just happened, one of the US government’s Knights of The Science, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was funneling US taxpayer-funded grant money for the purpose of doing gain-of-function research on exotic bat corona viruses. Gosh, why would you even do that? (Doesn’t gain of function = make it more deadly?)

Supposedly to gain knowledge so that mankind will be prepared to fight the emergence of deadly bat viruses that somehow manage to sneak into the human population at some future date. These things can happen, you know. We’ve already tangled with bird flu and swine flu, so deadly bat flu could hardly be out of the question. Of course, one of the dangers, when you are playing with deadly respiratory viruses in a lab, is that lab workers might inhale a virus or two and become infected with a specimen that The Science has engineered to be especially troublesome… but that was very unlikely, maintained Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief Science Advisor to the President.

Until this month when Dr. Fauci conceded to a Senate Committee that perhaps an investigation was warranted to find out if, perchance, Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan lab — since, it turns out, the Wuhan lab was such a sloppy-ass operation that its level of safety was comparable to an ordinary dentist’s office. It also turns out, according to a Wall Street Journal report this week, that three Wuhan lab workers did indeed need to be hospitalized in November 2019, which was around the time the bug got loose among the civilians of Wuhan City, while Chinese tourists and workers were still winging around the world on airplanes by the tens of thousands — prompting one to wonder whether, also perchance, this was something that the CCP wanted to happen? ¿Quién sabe?

Now that “safe and effective” vaccines are available against Covid-19, The Science is urging everybody to take it, pronto, and the government is assisting in the distribution and deployment of vaccinations even to the very borderline of coercing citizens into it by turning the “vaccine hesitant” into social pariahs. No restaurant meals or ballgames for you Science-offending trolls! How’s that working? According to Dr. Fauci, and several other Knights of The Science, more than half of the people on their staffs got vaxed voluntarily. More than half! Now that’s a ringing vote of confidence in The Science! . . .

[SNIP]